The syntactic monoid of a language is generalized to the level of a symmetric monoidal closed category $\mathcal D$. This allows for a uniform treatment of several notions of syntactic algebras known in the literature, including the syntactic monoids of Rabin and Scott ($\mathcal D=$ sets), the syntactic ordered monoids of Pin ($\mathcal D =$ posets), the syntactic semirings of Pol\'ak ($\mathcal D=$ semilattices), and the syntactic associative algebras of Reutenauer ($\mathcal D$ = vector spaces). Assuming that $\mathcal D$ is a commutative variety of algebras or ordered algebras, we prove that the syntactic $\mathcal D$-monoid of a language $L$ can be constructed as a quotient of a free $\mathcal D$-monoid modulo the syntactic congruence of $L$, and that it is isomorphic to the transition $\mathcal D$-monoid of the minimal automaton for $L$ in $\mathcal D$. Furthermore, in the case where the variety $\mathcal D$ is locally finite, we characterize the regular languages as precisely the languages with finite syntactic $\mathcal D$-monoids.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1504.02694

@article{paperbot406,
  title = {A Categorical Approach to Syntactic Monoids},
  author = {Jiří Adamek and Stefan Milius and Henning Urbat},
  journal = {Logical Methods in Computer Science},
  volume = {Volume 14, Issue 2},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.23638/lmcs-14(2:9)2018}
}